Okay, that’s a bit of a bullshit lie, but I’ll get to that. It may surprise some to read that I actually enjoy Bible-based movies. Not all of them, but some of the big ones, like Chuck Heston’s The Ten Commandmentsand Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the ChristI genuinely enjoyed on multiple levels, only one of them a snarky, sarcastic one.

Take TTC. It’s really fun. The colors are insane, the acting’s stuck in that why-so-serious? ’50s camp, and the effects still look pretty damn good. Not putting Avatar to shame, but convincing. And it’s a damn good story. Seriously. For a guy to go from an abandoned slave-child to the prince of the realm to an outcast who returns to overthrow the evil empire? That’s just awesome storytelling. (And thus my fave Bible story.)

TPotC is a little different. It looks great. It’s comparatively a dumb story. Sorry, Christians, but it’s really not that good. But anyway, it’s got solid performances, it’s kinda fun in a Christian-torture-porn sort of way, and then there’s the linguistic stuff.

Tongue!

As some may know, I’m a linguist so I’m a sucker for any film that goes into this stuff. This is why I really like Stargate. When I first heard that TPotC was spoken in the languages of the time, I was jazzed. It’s always cool to hear ancient/dead languages rendered, even if they can’t be to a perfect degree. I didn’t even care when I read that actually, the languages represented weren’t spoken at the time in that area. Nor was I bothered by the fact that an uneducated Jew spoke perfect Latin. It was a really fun experience.

Given the above, when I read that the 40-days-post-death Christ would be a film, I wasn’t instantly against it. Here’s a blurb from Deadline.

“The Resurrection is told through the eyes of an agnostic Roman Centurion charged by Pontius Pilate to investigate rumors of a risen Jewish Messiah and to locate Christ’s missing body in order to subdue an imminent uprising in Jerusalem.”

Okay, yeah. Sword-and-sandals meets Citizen Kane. I can see that. He goes to cool locations. He talks to a bunch of people. Maybe kills some of them. I’m in.

Oh, wait.

“Along Centurion’s mission, his doubts of such a supernatural occurrence peel away as he encounters the Apostles and other historic Biblical characters and reviews the events following the Resurrection. Liddell described the film as Gladiator in tone.”

Uh-huh. The Apostles. You mean the cats who couldn’t be bothered to allegedly write their accounts of alleged eyewitnessed supernatural, Earth-shattering events until decades after the fact? You mean those guys? Lemme guess. In the end, Centurion converts and then he’s dubbed Sir Constantine the Great or something (yes, I know Constantine came centuries later). Never mind. This sounds kinda lame. I have no problem with Hollywood telling biblical stories. There’s obviously a giant financial incentive to do so. I do have a problem with Hollywood condescending to me and presuming

that I do believe,

that I should, or

that believing is inherently good.

And yes, they have a possibly equal financial incentive to condescend to me as well, but it still irks me.

So fine, they’ll make their little movie about the guy who doesn’t believe then does and it’ll probably make some good money and okay. I’ll probably even end up watching it and writing a snarky review. All things considered, I really only have one request, and it’s about Christ himself: